“Do you have the time?”, an often asked question.

“Sorry, I don’t have the time”, a frequently used excuse.

Yet although each of us has been given different talents and variations of wealth, physical prowess and good looks, the one thing we all have in equal measure is the gift of TIME.  “Seasons of Love” a song from Rent (a rock musical with music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson), tells us there are 525,600 minutes in a year.  How we use them is up to us.

Rent was first seen in workshop production in 1993, before opening Off-Broadway and then moving to Broadway in April, 1996.  The show’s creator died suddenly before the Off-Broadway premiere, but his work went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for Best Musical among other distinctions before closing on September 7, 2008, after a twelve year run of 5,123 performances.

TIME is the one commodity that cannot be duplicated, traded, stored for later use, borrowed or stolen, but it can be lost or frittered away.  Or the 86,400 seconds each day can be put to good use and invested wisely. Of that number I should be able to schedule my two hours a day to Just Write.

But although we promise to seize the day, make every moment count and not waste a single second, the one thing we do not know is how many of those seconds, minutes or days, we have allotted to us.

Do I have the time to complete this project upon which I have embarked?  After all, I will be 77 on my next birthday.  It’s taking longer than I initially expected. “So,” you might ask, “How old will you be on your next Birthday if you don’t get the book done?”

George Elliot, alias Mary Ann Evans (11/22/19 – 12/22/80) English novelist, poet, journalist and one of the great writers of the Victorian Era who authored seven novels, tells us:  “It’s never too late to become what you were meant to be.”

Recently I came across a book about an artist who began her life’s work at seventy-two:  Mary Granville Delany (5/14/1700 – 4/15/1788) an 18th-century gentlewoman who invented a precursor of what we know today as collage, creating realistic flowers out of paper.  Titled The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock (born Buffalo, New York 1947) an American –Canadian poet, essayist ,biographer and speaker, whose multi-genre literary life also includes memoir, short fiction, and a one-woman show) is a meditation on late-life creativity and has beautiful illustrations and eloquent descriptions of her work.

We are all aware of Anna Mary Robertson Moses, more familiar to us as Grandma Moses, the renowned American folk artist who began painting in earnest at the age of 78 and is often cited as an example of an individual successfully beginning a career in the arts at an “advanced” age.  She lived to be over one hundred years old.

In this morning’s edition of USA Today I read a review of a new publication Barkskins (Scribner, 713 pages) written by Annie Proulx.  The headline reads:  “Barkskins has Earth-shattering message” and the article goes on to say, “The work is masterful, full of an urgent, tense lyricism, its plotting beautifully unexpected, its biographical narratives flowing into one another like the seasons.”   WOW!  And Ms. Proulx, the author, is eighty.

This is not her first novel.  She has what the writer of the review (Charles Finch) calls a “towering reputation” having won most of the major American literary prizes.  But he goes on to say that her best previous novel, The Shipping News, was “full of bad writing , but even more full of good writing.” He said “her most famous novel, Brokeback Mountain, was uneven and genuinely weak.” And, “It is amazing to behold an author of her age move not toward a smaller scale, but to a larger one.”

Did you notice that all of these inspiring examples are women?

“Writing a book is like driving a car in the fog at night.  You never see any further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

E.L.Doctorow (American novelist, editor and professor, best known internationally for his works of historical fiction, i.e. Ragtime and Billy Bathgate).

So I will take heart, get to work, and use whatever TIME God gives me to complete my mission. Carpe Diem!  And pray that I have enough of them to get the job done.